Page Podcast

In high school, Josh, Fodrea, and I spent a lot of time in my parent’s basement, and though we didn’t intend to live out the stereotype, we found that basements make for the perfect tabletop gaming environment. Every Friday night, we’d pull up chairs around the ping pong table in my parent’s basement and scatter our Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition manuals across its surface initiate the seven-hour session of make-believe that would culminate in a sleepy stagger up the stairs in the wake of a miasma that only high school boys can produce.

The Basement Cast is more than just an homage to those days. It reminds us that some of the best parts of life stay with you if you let them. We record shows for The Basement Cast in the basement of my house, on the ping pong table I received as a wedding gift. Creatures of habit, indeed.

No sooner than not-John climbed back into his truck, I had unboxed the Yeti on the ping pong table, plugged it in, and started recording myself.

The initial setup was simple. We would get a single Yeti for a solo recording of the narrator. The voiceover had to be sharp and crisp, so we left the heavy hardware for that purpose. A pair of blue snowballs would suit the rest of the cast, omni- or bi-directional modes engaged (those who are currently cringing or grinding your teeth, just wait. There’s more).

Later that day, I drove to Best Buy and purchased a pair of Blue Snowballs. Fodrea came with, and together we hooked up all three microphones via a USB hub into my computer, pulled up Garageband, and started recording the two of us.

For those of you unfamiliar with multi-mic recording with USB microphones, let me explain something important you should know. It is possible. But so is riding a bike without handlebars. Even if something is possible, that doesn’t mean it is the best or even a good way to do it.

Still, despite a few bad crashes, we managed to get the bike going and as we picked up speed, we basked in the giddy anticipation of preparing for something new.

We noticed something, though. Though both microphones were billed as being exceptional quality for the price, the extra $50 of the Yeti bought you a lot in terms of sound. The difference between the two was stark, and as we ascended the basement stairs, I began to think and rethink.

Was one Yeti really enough?

Fodrea bought the next two Yetis. They arrived in two days, delivered to his department by a man who may have been John. The plans had changed, and now we envisioned a more individualistic setup. Each person gets their own mic. The more powerful Yetis would support softer voices (like my own), while Josh’s boisterous rumble might be contained by the less impressive Snowball. Each voice would get its own track in Garageband, making it easy to remove cross talk and the occasional bodily chorus.

To anyone who has been down this path before, let me say this. We were foolhardy, led by the nose down a path of flimsy promises by the simple expectation that what you could do with two Snowballs and a Yeti you could do with two Snowballs and three Yetis.

To everyone else, buckle up and let me tell you a little something about serial numbers.

In order to use multiple USB microphones on an Apple computer, you have to create what is called an aggregate device, which is essentially a combination of inputs that the computer understands as one device. Garageband will accept this one device and, with enough positive thinking, will allow you to put each channel onto a different track. After a lot of tinkering, we made this work initially with the two Snowballs and the Yeti. The device recognized all three as unique devices, and we were able to assign each to a separate track. This is because each device had its own serial number and, therefore, its own identifier.

When we plugged in all five devices, we immediately noticed an issue. The aggregate device did not seem to change despite the two new microphones now plugged in. The computer only recognized two Snowballs and a Yeti. Certainly there was some sort of issue.

I unplugged the hub and plugged it back in. Three devices.

I restarted Garageband. Three devices

I restarted the computer and installed updates.

Three. Devices.

During my cycle of thinking and rethinking, it would have been great had I thought to check that multiple Blue Yetis were a workable option. Even if I had accidentally typed multiple Yetis in Google, I would have found a popular post decrying the fact that Blue Yetis all possess the same serial number and therefore will only ever be recognized as a single device despite the number being used. Had I read farther down the page, I would have run into a solution to the issue, which involved contacting Blue, packaging and shipping the microphones back to their California HQ, and waiting for up to 2 weeks for them to reassign serial numbers to the microphones before sending them back in usable condition.

But I didn’t. Instead, I thought about what song we would use for our intro.

We were at an impasse. Five working microphones sat on the table before us, more or less unusable in their current condition. We could send back two Yetis and replace them with two Snowballs, sure. That way everyone would have their own microphone and we could move ahead with the podcast. By this point, we had Coyote’s Ballad mapped out with voices assigned. All we needed were microphones.

But we weren’t settled on the quality of the Snowballs. More Yetis would yield a better sound, and we wanted a polished product out of the gate. We discussed the matter at length and finally decided to send back two of the Yetis to have their serial numbers changed.

So there we were, a few budding podcasters with parts assigned, stories highlighted and ready for production, and two Blue Snowballs. To say this was a far throw from what I’d imagined is an understatement, but we didn’t really have much of a deadline. Nothing had been promised to anyone at that time, so we settled in an prepared for two and a half weeks of patient waiting.

In December of 2017, I became close with a man named John. John was a delivery man who drove for UPS. Several days during that month, I’d watch from our picture window as John pulled up alongside the curb in front of our house, scrutinized our narrow driveway that could never accommodate a cargo truck, cursed, and turned on his hazards.
As John approached the house, I readied the packages next to me: Frankensteinian Amazon boxes that I had torn open with relish days ago and resealed with less vigor a few minutes before John knocked on the door. I opened it. John breathed a heavy sigh.

“Return pickup, right?”

I smiled and handed him the stack of packages.

This happened at least four times over the course of the month, and each time I saw a little bit of John’s hope in the world die as I opened the door and handed him my returns. I knew what he must think. At best, here’s a guy who has figured out how to play the system and is getting rich off of Amazon’s merciful policies. At worst, this guy just likes watching me suffer.

For the sake of John and you few who are still reading, I’d like to offer an explanation.

When I’m home alone and Amy is at work, I walk around and think. This, I have found, is a dangerous process. You see, I don’t think as much as I rethink. I decide and reconsider. Do and regret. Impulse and consternation are my major humors, and so when I finished grading semester one essays and clicked Submit on the grades, I began thinking and rethinking about how I would spend the next two weeks.

In other words, what would I obsess about?

There was the novel, of course, sitting there “finished” but unedited. But instead of beat my head against the keyboard, I thought about another pursuit.

A week prior, I had coffee with my friends Josh and Fodrea. We’ve been friends since high school, and a common theme in our interactions together has been coming up with big ideas that we’d certainly do some day (I’d tell you about a few, but then you’d take them. They’re very good ideas). That day, we talked about creating a podcast that takes short stories and produces them as audio dramas. I’d been dreading the idea of putting my work out into the world, and so this would be a way to help other people who might be feeling that same sense of foreboding. Plus, it was an excuse to hang out and goof around.

When we parted, I fully expected this idea to go the way of the oak table (a story for another day) and remain a dream.

Fodrea called me two days later and asked a very important question: “Why don’t we just do it?”

“Do what?”

“The podcast. All we need are mics. I can build us a website. Libsyn is affordable if we all pitch in. Let’s just do it.”

Just do it. It was as though Nike herself, in all her divine glory, had opened my eyes. The path was set. Clearly arranged.

All we needed were mics.

So I paced and thought and rethought until I sat down at the computer and started researching microphones for podcasting. I pulled up article after article and started looking for the names that came up most often.

Blue Yeti
Blue Snowball
Audio Technica 2020
Heil PR 40

I compared prices and started considering our needs.

Page could require quite a few mics, depending on the demands of the story. This meant I needed either multiple mics or a few with the capability to pick up multiple voices. The Blue mics seemed the logical choice. Along with being well-reviewed and affordable, the Yeti and Snowball offered omni-directional mode, which meant multiple people could be picked up around the microphone.

It was settled. I bought a Yeti. Two day delivery.

I acted, then I rethought. The Yeti is a USB microphone, which comes with certain benefits. It is easy to use, just plug in and go, and relatively transportable. I didn’t want to worry about learning how to hook up a mixer or an audio interface, and so it seemed perfect at the time.

Still, I looked to the dissenters, those who preached the good word of xlr mics as more powerful and easily upgradeable. A part of me began second guessing. If we really were doing this thing, didn’t it make sense to think about the long run? If a USB would only get us so far, were we setting ourselves up to hit a wall in progress.

These thoughts battered my conscience until, two days later, a man (not John) arrived at my door with a box.

Coyote’s Ballad is historical speculative fiction which delves into the racial history of the American Wild West. Israel Ramses Jackson II, the story’s hero, is a black cowboy. He’s not the only black cowboy in America’s media by a longshot (Django from Django Unchained comes to mind, as does Elmer Kelton’s protagonist in his book, Wagontongue), but he’s my response to the to the erasure of black cowboys specifically, but the whitewashing of the American Wild West generally.

“‘If something is not in the popular imagination, it does not exist….The American West is often considered the birthplace of America, where Americans were distinct from their European Counterparts….The West was where white men were able to show their courage. But if a black man could be heroic and have all the attributes that you give the best qualities of men, then how was it possible to treat a black man as subservient or as a non-person?'”

Israel is my tiny droplet in the sea of media expanding what a Western (as in the genre, but also the philosophical category) protagonist ought to be: a black man who rejects the racially-motivated termination of an entire species of bovine while outwitting a wily Necromancer from Ancient Minoan along the way.

Griswold Ritter Von Bitterlich, Coyote’s Ballad’s villain, is a recurring character in my historical fiction. He’s a millennias-old Necromancer from North Africa whose flesh has been bleached white by time and exposure—and he ruthlessly exploits his ability to pass as a white man in a colonized world.

Griswold isn’t the villain because he can pass as a white man. He’s the villain because he idly watched the evolution of a global racial caste over thousands of years and consistently sided with the oppressors. He’s the villain because he has all the privileges we can dream of—wealth, power, influence, complexion, gender, eternal freakin’ life—and still acts with all the foresight of a spoiled kid.

The part of me which loves history is always mindful that History is at its best a coercive fiction: there are always narratives compelled to silence in the gaps of every history. If Israel is my effort to give voice to a part of the American West lost to erasure, then Griswold is the gap in Western history which eats the voices which protest and resist the impulses that led to manifest destiny.

Here’s something I very recently learned: it is easy to submit a podcast.

Submit. Before you punch through your screen in agonized dissent, notice I said submit. Creating this podcast challenged me in ways I had never considered, even as a frequent listener and occasional contributor to other podcasts. I’ve learned so much during this time, and I have nothing but respect for those who pour so much time, energy, and creativity into making professional content they are willing to share with the world for free.

But iTunes just…takes it.

I submitted our RSS feed to iTunes at 5:45pm on a Sunday night and my Google-sleuthing revealed that, for the most part, it could take a while for iTunes to get around to reviewing and accepting the feed.

24 hours. 48 hours. “Give it a good week,” one person said.

Fair enough. I gave Apple some breathing room, and only started obsessively checking my email after a whole hour of patient waiting.

At 6:37pm on that same Sunday, they accepted the podcast, and I could view the iTunes page. There it was. Page: New Voices In Fiction. Look! That’s our logo. I made that.

By the time I clicked submit that evening, I had already obsessed over the details of the RSS feed. Title, art, ID3 info for the “Prologue” episode — I double-, triple- checked everything. As I scrutinized, I imagined a team of Apple’s finest gathered around a table — I think Steve Wozniak was there — pulling up the feed, scrutinizing the details, listening again and to the introduction. Judging. Taking notes. Hours of notes. 24. 48. A week, even.

Maybe this actually happens, and over time the team has become incredibly efficient. Maybe Woz is the real stickler, but by some miracle he had to pee and left the room just as Page rolled down the pipes.

What is more likely, though, is that it’s actually really easy to submit a podcast.

That leaves a different sort of anxiety nesting in the pit of your stomach. You have a podcast, yes, but do you have listeners? If there is no guarantee that your work has been Woz-approved, if you have no established platform or fanbase, how do you ensure your voice is heard?

The idea for Page came out of a conversation with my friend Josh about this exact idea. People I know write books. I know this because I read them. People I know make movies, which I watch and enjoy. I’ve participated multiple times in a friend’s RPG Actual Play podcast, so I know that people make podcasts. These talented friends have been clever and resourceful enough to build audiences and communities around their work. They reach people with their art.

This past summer, I wrote a novel. There, I said it, though it still sounds weird. I created something that I hope to share with a lot of people. Fortunately, there is no dearth of voices on the internet who will tell you about their experiences, trials, and best practices when it comes to traditional publishing.

Unfortunately, there are also plenty of people who will readily tell you just how fraught the publication process can be. They’ll tell you the chilling percentage of new authors that actually get a traditional publishing deal and follow that up with an even frostier percentage of authors whose work actually sells. This was the first major punch to the gut when I finished the novel and started to consider the editing and publication route. Creation is just the beginning, so it is hard to imagine that it could also be the end.

Like submitting a podcast, sending a query letter is really easy, and so a similar question arises. If submission is not success, if just doing something does not guarantee that anyone will see or enjoy it, then what remains to drive a person to create?

I told this to Josh in one great rush. He blinked, thought for a moment, and said, “Alright, let’s just make your novel an audiobook.”

What a strange idea: let’s just do it ourselves. Self-publish, but in an audio format. Build a community by creating quality content on a consistent basis.

So we are doing just that. Not with my novel (though it might happen), but the work of talented people who have created amazing works that haven’t yet taken off.

Producing Page has taught me something incredibly valuable that I needed to realize. Submission is success. If you’ve created something that is uniquely you, then that is really cool. That’s an accomplishment. Creation is a rare thing in a consumer culture, so never discount the work you’ve put in. Keep creating, keep sharing, and keep talking about what you love. Eventually, people will listen.

The guiding mission of Page is to celebrate creators and their work. To build a community around them that encourages creativity and support.

Austin and Amy sit down to discuss Page, a new storytelling podcast that takes original short fiction from emerging authors and produces them as audio narratives, complete with narration, voice acting, music, and sound effects.